Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Friday, July 03, 2015

"Criminalizing millions of Americans overnight": those pushing a neo-Victorian code of sexual conduct are on the Left

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve increasingly had the experience of saying things that would have been considered pieties in the liberal catechism when I was young—and which now will get you labeled as a howling reactionary

… The left had the reputation of being defenders of free speech, for example, but it was always something of a case of “free speech for me but not for thee.” They were all in favor of “questioning authority”—until they became the authorities.

More important, the left has moved farther to the left, leaving moderate “liberalism” behind and embracing a more consistent, authoritarian collectivism.

3) Government should stay out of the bedroom.

This was one of the big selling points for the liberals.
Conservatives were scary religious zealots who wanted to tell you what
music you should listen to, censor your movies and television shows, and
worst of all, invade your bedroom and tell you who could sleep with and
what you could do with them.

It was all a bit overblown and it wasn’t as simplistic a partisan
narrative as you might remember. (The campaign against rock music
lyrics, for example, was spearheaded by Tipper Gore, wife of
then-Senator Al Gore.) But there’s little doubt that things have
changed, and now it’s the left that is pushing a neo-Victorian code of sexual conduct.

I remember during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, when Ken Starr released
a report poring over the details of Clinton’s sordid encounters with
Monica Lewinsky, how creepy all the liberals thought it was for a
prosecutor to examine every detail of other people’s sexual encounters,
like some kind of peeping Tom. Yet this is now the exact system set up
on every college campus, which is prepared to produce a Starr Report for
every drunken hook-up.

And the crazy ideas that start on campus have a tendency to escape from the asylum. Thus, the Washington Examiner‘s Ashe Schow reports
that the campus system of “yes means yes,” in which lovers must receive
express permission for every minor stage of a sexual act or risk being
prosecuted by a regretful partner after the fact, is now being proposed
as the legal model for criminal prosecution nationwide. As Schow puts
it, this is a standard “so stringent that it would criminalize millions
of Americans overnight,” and is “part of a push to bring
authoritarianism into the bedroom.”

And it’s not just what goes on behind closed doors. Every statement
about sex, every public depiction of anything that remotely connotes
sex—from movies to music to video games—has to be loaded up with social
and political significance and policed for evidence of forbidden sexual
attitudes.

These days, if you want to hear someone tell everyone to lighten up
when it comes to sex and to stop making everything a crime, you’re far
more likely to hear that from the right. Frankly, there are a lot of us
who are just wishing we could hear less about what is going on in
everybody else’s bedrooms.

The biggest threat to sex as we know it is the coming revision of U.S.
sex-crime laws. For a glimpse into this frightening future, look no
further than Judith Shulevitz's latest in The New York Times. Shulevitz chronicles how "affirmative consent"
(the principle, often referred to as "yes means yes," that the mere
absence of a "no" is not sufficient permission to proceed sexually) has
been quietly spreading from California universities to colleges across the country, and could soon mutate out of academia entirely.

… "The traditional premise in the law has been that individuals are
presumed to be sexually available and willing to have intercourse—with
anyone, at any time, at any place—in the absence of clear indications to
the contrary," states ALI. The new model "posits, to the contrary, that
in the absence of affirmative indications of a person’s willingness to
engage in sexual activity, such activity presumably is not desired."

Mind you, these are not conservative prudes; these are not Americans in general; who these people are are the leftists who are allegedly open, and tolerant, and against the prudes.

The draft guidelines drew strong criticism from
some members, including law professors and lecturers from the
University of Pittsburgh, Duke University, Rutgers, Harvard, and
Georgetown University. "If there is political consensus on anything in
the United States today, it is the consensus that our government
has overcriminalized and overincarcerated the American public," they
write. Yet "against this political consensus and judicial backdrop, the
current ALI draft is an extreme deviation, focused on expanding criminal
sanctions for sexual behavior."

… "None of this is inadvertent or the result of loose drafting," the lawyers and professors suggest.

To the contrary, the intentionality of the draft is fully disclosed
in the announcement that its purpose is to create very expansive
statutes and standards with a "default position" of overcriminalization